Official website of the Institute Russian history The Russian Academy of Sciences announced that on July 21, 2015, at the age of 70, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Chief Researcher Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Scientific Secretary of the Center military history Russian Viktor Nikolaevich Zemskov.

“The whole life of Viktor Nikolayevich was inextricably linked with the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where he worked for more than 50 years,” the report says. - Viktor Nikolayevich became especially famous for his archival research, in the late 1980s and early 1990s he was the discoverer of archival funds previously closed to scientists on the history of political repressions in the USSR.

The name of Viktor Zemskov will say little to a wide audience. His books were not published in millions of copies, they were not decorated with catchy titles. He preferred painstaking work with historical documents to the pursuit of high-profile sensations.

In 1989, at the peak of perestroika, Zemskov joined the commission to determine the population losses of the Department of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences, headed by Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences Yuri Polyakov. The commission received access to the statistical reports of the OGPU-NKVD-MVD-MGB, stored in the Central state archive October revolution.

These previously classified documents contained all the factual information about real history political repressions of the Soviet period.

As already mentioned, Viktor Zemskov was not chasing sensations, but the research materials he published turned the notion of the scale of political repression in the USSR upside down.

Secret made clear

A historian who has never hidden his negative attitude towards Stalinist repressions, came to the conclusion that the data on tens and hundreds of millions of repressed people, which appeared in foreign studies, in media materials from the time of perestroika, do not correspond to reality.

Having thoroughly studied all the materials, Zemskov established that in the period from 1921 to 1953, 4,060,306 people were convicted in the USSR “for counter-revolutionary and other especially dangerous state crimes”, of which 799,455 people were sentenced to capital punishment.

Zemskov also refuted the commonplace statement about "a country where every second went through camps." According to the results of the study, it was found that the maximum total number As of January 1, 1950, there were 2,760,095 people imprisoned in camps throughout Soviet history, and the average number of prisoners ranged from 1.5 to 2.5 million people. This includes both political prisoners and those convicted of criminal offences.

For comparison: in the United States in 2013, the number of prisoners reached 2.2 million people.

Documents against emotions

The results of Viktor Zemskov's research did not at all correspond to those ideas about repressions in the USSR, which were formed under the influence of the book Alexandra Solzhenitsyn"The Gulag Archipelago" and various exposing journalistic materials of the perestroika era.

Zemskov was accused of "falsification" and tried to refute his conclusions. But the historian calmly, with facts in hand, parried all the arguments of his opponents.

For example, Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, Director State Museum Gulag history a, the son of the executed revolutionary and Soviet statesman Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, accusing Zemskov of distorting reality, stated that in 1946 there were 16 million prisoners in the Gulag. Antonov-Ovseenko claimed that these figures were based on the number of food rations issued.

“It must be understood that on the date that Antonov-Ovseenko (1946) has in mind, not 16 million, but 1.6 million prisoners were kept in the camps and colonies of the Gulag. You should still pay attention to the comma between the numbers, ”Viktor Zemskov coolly objected in his work“ On the scale of political repressions in the USSR ”, noting in passing that there are no the names of his respected opponent, which means that he is familiar with the material by hearsay.

Very soon it became obvious that against Zemskov's factual material, his opponents could only present emotions and evidence in the style of "one knowledgeable person told me."

Life's work

In the end, lovers of reasoning about "tens of millions of victims of the Soviet regime" decided that the work of Viktor Zemskov was the easiest to ignore.

And Zemskov continued his work, leaving no stone unturned from a huge number of myths about Soviet history formed over the past decades.

There is no doubt that in due time this outstanding historian will be given credit for his work, which is important not only for understanding the past, but also for the future of our country.

Viktor Nikolaevich Zemskov has repeatedly spoken from the pages of Arguments and Facts.

Viktor Nikolaevich Zemskov(January 30, 1946 - July 22, 2015, Moscow, Russian Federation) - Soviet and Russian historian, Doctor of Historical Sciences (2005), chief researcher at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Researcher of demographic aspects of political repressions in the USSR in 1917–1954.

Viktor Nikolayevich's entire life was inextricably linked with the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where he worked for more than 50 years.
In 1974 he graduated from the Moscow State University, in the same year he joined the Institute, having passed all the steps in his scientific career. Viktor Nikolayevich became especially famous for his archival research; in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he was the discoverer of archival funds on the history of political repressions in the USSR that were previously closed to scientists.
VN Zemskov made a significant contribution to the development of historical science. He studied the history of the Soviet working class, political repressions in the USSR, the statistics of the Gulag prisoners, the history of special settlers, the fate of repatriates of the Second World War, etc. His monographs “Special Settlers in the USSR. 1930-1960" (M., 2003), "People and War: Pages of the History of the Soviet People on the Eve and During the Great Patriotic War, 1938-1945" (M., 2014) and others.
For many years, Viktor Nikolayevich was a member of the Academic and Dissertation Councils of the IRI RAS, was a member of the Association of Historians of the Second World War, was a member of the Scientific Council of the Russian Academy of Sciences on problems of military history under the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences, scientific secretary of the Center for Military History of Russia of the IRI RAS.

The current mass popularity of Stalin is a merit, including the works of Zemskov.
There is a certain irony in the fact that it was Zemskov, who positioned himself as an anti-Stalinist, who dealt a death blow to the myth of "millions of those who were shot." Within the framework of elementary scientific conscientiousness and working with the primary documents of the NKVD and the Gulag, he approached the assessment of repressions in the USSR from the standpoint of facts, and not ideological preferences, showing history in the style of "as it was", and not as one would like in the style of well-known myths " everyone was imprisoned and shot without guilt" and "everyone was imprisoned and shot for a cause." As a result, his work in the mid-2000s actually buried a whole bunch of black myths about Stalin and the USSR and contributed to the historical rehabilitation of Stalin in Russia. When you see now young man, which ridicules the liberal with his cries about "hundreds of millions of victims of Stalinism", behind this is also the work of Zemskov, who gave the texture, which to a large extent made it possible to overcome part of the Khrushchev and perestroika chernukha.

Researcher of the demographic aspects of political repressions in the USSR in 1917-1954.

Encyclopedic YouTube

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✪ Theory of delusions → Soviet prisoners of war

✪ Intelligence: Klim Zhukov about meeting public needs

✪ Presentation of the book "War of annihilation" in Donetsk

Subtitles

Biography

In 2005 he defended his doctoral dissertation “ Special settlers in the USSR. 1930-1960» .

Member of the Academic Council of the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Member of the Dissertation Council at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Member of the Association of World War II Historians.

Scientific Secretary of the Center for Military History of Russia.

Significance of scientific works

He was the discoverer of archival funds previously closed to scientists on the history of political repressions in the USSR. Thanks to the works of V. N. Zemskov, the public, which had previously drawn information about repressions in the USSR from journalism, had the opportunity to get acquainted with the scientific point of view on the nature and extent of repressions. Sociologist and political scientist S. Kara-Murza characterizes the works of V. N. Zemskov in the following way:

... The historian V.N. Zemskov has been busy with painstaking but very important work for almost ten years now: he systematizes archival data reflecting the activities of the Gulag, and publishes detailed reports on all categories of the repressed. Publishes without emotion, in special journals on history and sociology. He himself is by no means a Stalinist, and this is reliably stated in publications. Not a Stalinist, but respects the facts. Democrats try not to notice him and not enter into polemics with him. But at first they staged an attack in the form of a damning article by A.V. Antonov-Ovseenko. V.N. Zemskov answered this in his dispassionate manner ...

Viktor Zemskov's response to A. V. Antonov-Ovseenko's criticism:

…BUT. V. Antonov-Ovseenko on the pages of Literary Gazette in the article "Confrontation" expressed an opinion about the false origin of the documents I used and, therefore, the unreliable nature of the published figures (2). On this occasion it is necessary to say the following. The question of forgery could be considered if we relied on one or several disparate documents. However, it is impossible to forge a whole archival fund with thousands of storage units, which is in public storage, which also includes a huge array of primary materials (it is possible to assume that primary materials are fake only if we assume the absurd idea that each camp had two offices: one that conducted genuine office work , and the second - inauthentic). Nevertheless, all these documents have been subjected to a thorough source analysis, and their authenticity has been established with a 100% guarantee. The data from the primary materials ultimately coincide with the summary statistical reporting of the GULAG and with the information contained in the memos of the Gulag leadership addressed to N. I. Yezhov, L. P. Beria, S. N. Kruglov, as well as in the memos of the latter addressed to V. Stalin. Therefore, the documentation of all levels that we used is genuine. The assumption that this documentation could contain underestimated information is untenable for the reason that it was unprofitable and even dangerous for the NKVD bodies to underestimate the scale of their activities, because otherwise they were in danger of falling out of favor with those in power for "insufficient activity".

The statistics of the GULAG prisoners, cited by A.V. Antonov-Ovseenko, is based on evidence that, as a rule, is far from the truth. So, in particular, he writes in the mentioned article: “According to the data of the Gulag General Supply Department, almost 16 million were on allowances in places of detention - according to the number of rations in the first post-war years". The list of persons who used this document does not contain the name Antonova-Ovseenko. Consequently, he did not see this document and quotes it from someone else's words, and with the grossest distortion of meaning. If A. V. Antonov-Ovseenko had seen this document, he would probably have paid attention to the comma between the numbers 1 and 6, since in reality in the fall of 1945, not 16 million, but 1.6 million prisoners were kept in the camps and colonies of the Gulag .

The fact that the alleged statistics of A. V. Antonov-Ovseenko, as well as the information of O. G. Shatunovskaya, are refuted by the data of the primary Gulag materials, makes further polemics on this topic completely meaningless ...

Scientific works

Monographs

• Why there was no uprising - M .: "Algorithm", 2014. - 239 p. - ISBN 978-5-4438-0677-8
• Special settlers in USSR, 1930-1960. - M.: "Science", 2005. - 306 p.

Articles

• Prisoners, special settlers, exiled settlers, exiles and deportees (Statistical and geographical aspect) // History USSR. - 1991. - No. 5. - pp. 151-165.

The famous historian Viktor Zemskov has died.

The Directorate and trade union committee of the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences announce with deep regret that on July 21, 2015, at the age of 70, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Chief Researcher of the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Academic Secretary of the Center for Military History of Russia, died suddenly
VICTOR NIKOLAEVICH ZEMSKOV

Viktor Nikolayevich's entire life was inextricably linked with the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where he worked for more than 50 years.
After graduating from Moscow State University in 1974, in the same year he joined the Institute, having passed all the steps in his scientific career. Viktor Nikolayevich became especially famous for his archival research; in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he was the discoverer of archival funds previously closed to scientists on the history of political repressions in the USSR.
VN Zemskov made a significant contribution to the development of historical science. He studied the history of the Soviet working class, political repressions in the USSR, the statistics of the Gulag prisoners, the history of special settlers, the fate of repatriates of the Second World War, etc. His monographs “Special Settlers in the USSR. 1930-1960" (M., 2003), "People and War: Pages of the History of the Soviet People on the Eve and During the Great Patriotic War, 1938-1945" (M., 2014) and others.
For many years, Viktor Nikolayevich was a member of the Academic and Dissertation Councils of the IRI RAS, was a member of the Association of Historians of the Second World War, was a member of the Scientific Council of the Russian Academy of Sciences on problems of military history under the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences, scientific secretary of the Center for Military History of Russia of the IRI RAS.
Viktor Nikolaevich was not only an excellent scientist, but also a wonderful person - an optimist by nature, kind and sympathetic to colleagues, and a great worker. He also earned respect for the fact that he did not compromise his principles and was not afraid to defend his point of view. This is a huge loss for the staff of the Institute of Russian History.
We express our most sincere condolences to the family and friends of the deceased.
BRIGHT MEMORY
Farewell to V.N. Zemskov will be held on July 25, Saturday at 10.30. in the morgue of Hospital No. 81 (Lobnenskaya St., 10).
Directions: metro station "Petrovsko-Razumovskaya", bus 672.

PS. What can I say. The current mass popularity of Stalin is a merit, including the works of Zemskov.
There is a certain irony in the fact that it was Zemskov, who positioned himself as an anti-Stalinist, who dealt a death blow to the myth of "millions of those who were shot." Within the framework of elementary scientific conscientiousness and working with the primary documents of the NKVD and the Gulag, he approached the assessment of repressions in the USSR from the standpoint of facts, and not ideological preferences, showing history in the style of "as it was", and not as one would like in the style of well-known myths " everyone was imprisoned and shot without guilt" and "everyone was imprisoned and shot for a cause." As a result, his work in the mid-2000s actually buried a whole bunch of black myths about Stalin and the USSR and contributed to the historical rehabilitation of Stalin in Russia. When you now see a young man who ridicules a liberal with his cries about "hundreds of millions of victims of Stalinism", this is also the work of Zemskov, who gave the texture, which to a large extent made it possible to overcome part of the Khrushchev and perestroika chernukha.

Viktor Nikolaevich Zemskov, who tried to substantiate the thesis of scientific falsification and overestimation of the official figure for the total losses of the USSR as a result of the Great patriotic war, I published online chapter 8 from the book E.M.Andreev, L.E.Darskaya and T.L.Kharkova.
What is the essence of Zemskov's argument?
To begin with, he seems to accept the position that losses in the war should be calculated as the difference between the estimated number of deaths, based on the death rate in 1940, and the actual number of deaths in 1941-1945. That is, in order to estimate the number of losses, it is necessary to calculate the cumulative supermortality of each war year compared to the "background" mortality rate of 1940.
Zemskov knows that 4.2 million people died in 1940. Thus, the historian believes, from July 1941 to the end of 1945, the background number of deaths should be 4.2 million x 4.5 years = 18.9 million. However, evil demographers falsified these data. Starting from a lower figure - 11.9 million "background" deaths, they, according to Zemskov, overestimated the number of population losses by at least 7 million!
What can I say ... It was not bad for a historian to read the only one for today fundamental research population of the USSR for 1922 - 1991, indicated above. Then he probably did not begin to write this nonsense.
The fact is that 11.9 million is the "background" mortality not of the entire population, but only of those who were born before July 1941. Mortality of children born during the war was calculated separately.
Here is a quote from that work: " Total number of people who died or were out of the country during the period under review OF THE BORN BEFORE JUNE 22, 1941. is, thus, 37.2 million people. However, all this number cannot, of course, be attributed to human losses, since even in peacetime, some part of the living would die in 4.5 years. If the age mortality rates of the population of the USSR in 1941 - 1945. remained the same as in the pre-war 1940, then the number of deaths in four and a half years would have amounted to 11.9 million people. So the loss of life THESE GENERATIONS make up a total of 25.3 million people (37.2 million - 11.9 million).

Did you notice the highlights? That is, the paragraph refers ONLY to people born BEFORE JUNE 22. It is for them that the background mortality would have amounted to 11.9 million. For a complete account, a significantly reduced number of dead children aged 0-1 years must be added to this number. If the birth rate of 1940 had been maintained, about 7 million out of 31 million born in 4.5 years would have died. Without additional military child deaths, with the actual military birth rate (16.5 million births from July 1941 to December 1946), 3.7 million children would have died.

In total, the total background mortality of the entire population (born before and after the start of the war), according to Andreev, can be considered equal to approximately 11.9 + 3.7 = 15.6 million. This is less than 18.9 million by 3.3 million (due to reduced birth rate and, accordingly, the number of child deaths).
As a result, we have as a result of the war an additional 25.3 million deaths from among those born before July 1941 and 1.3 million additional deaths of children born during the war. Total: 26.6 million military supermortality.

The balance, based on Andreev's data, is as follows:

The population of the USSR by July 1941 - 196.7 million
The population of the USSR by January 1946 - 170,5
People born before July 1941 would have died at the 1940 mortality rate for this period - 11.9 million
With the death and birth rate of 1940, 31 million people would have been born during this time, 18.9 million would have died, of which 7 million were children of the first two years of life
In view of the reduction in the number of births during the war years to 16.5 million, at the death rate of 1940, 3.7 million children would have died
Due to the hardships of the war, 1.3 million more children actually died.
In total, with the death rate of 1940 and the reduced number of births characteristic of the war, would be 15.6 million (11,9+3,7)
The population difference between July 1941 and January 1946 is 26.2 million.
Because approximately 500 thousand survived and remained abroad, we will consider the difference 26.2 million - 0.5 = 25.7 million
Considering that 16.5 million were born during this period, a total of 25.7 + 16.5 = died 42.2 million people .
Since, with the mortality rate of 1940, 15.6 million would have died during this period, the supermortality compared to 1940 was 42.2 - 15.6 = 26.6 million

That is, Zemskov's mistake is stupid and shameful for a serious historian. Trying to say a new word about the losses, he did not even bother to read the literature on the issue. And as a result, he got into trouble. Further more. The following paragraph cannot be explained otherwise than by clouding the mind of the researcher:

“But it is also possible to prove by the balance method that the direct human losses (victims of the war) of the USSR amounted to about 16 million. To do this, it is necessary to establish the correct ratio of the level of natural mortality between the relatively prosperous demographic years of 1940 and the extreme years of 1941-1945. Ratio 1: 1, established by the commission that worked in 1989-1990, cannot be considered correct, because it was clear that in 1941-1945, due to the deterioration of living conditions, the lack of scarce medicines, etc., the level of natural mortality of the population would inevitably increase. And here, an upward correction is needed when calculating this level in relation to the extreme years of 1941-1945 and set it within the framework of not 18.9 million, but bring it to at least 22 million. This value (22 million) is the minimum allowable level of natural mortality population in 1941-1945."
That is, it turns out that Zemskov did not realize that the military mortality, which exceeds the mortality rate in peacetime, is not natural, but unnatural mortality, more correctly, supermortality. Excess deaths compared to peacetime are victims of war, that is, nothing more than losses.
Suppose millions of people died during the war from starvation and overload, and Zemskov refuses to take them into account as victims of the war. Like, what is it? "Natural mortality"...
Personally, after such mistakes, I had big doubts about Viktor Nikolayevich's professional suitability. Let's hope that this is only a short-term "jump" of the venerable scientist.

UPD. Corrected my calculations on Andreev's numbers, made a balance